In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was within me an invincible summer.
—Albert Camus, Return To Tipasa
The hurricane had come and was almost gone. Hurricane Flossie had been downgraded to a tropical storm and they were letting people fly from island to island again. Cindy and I had been to Lahaina in Maui where we got caught in a downpour. It was so strong that it felt like we’d taken a swim in the ocean with all of our clothes on. I had to change into dry clothes in the back of my car.
Cindy and I were in Maui for a short vacation. We had planned to fly over to see The Cure in Honolulu—their first time ever in Hawaii. I had written to Robert to tell him that we would be coming if the storm allowed. He emailed with words to the effect that I should not worry about the storm and come see them anyway. I really wanted to see Robert and the rest of the band. I hadn’t seen them all since the “Reflections” tour had ended over a year before. So Cindy called the airline to get tickets over to Honolulu and booked a hotel for us to stay in on the night of the gig.
We drove to the airport in Maui and got on the plane to Honolulu. Outside the window the dark remnants of Flossie were scudding about the sky. It was just a short thirty-minute flight to Honolulu and then a quick cab ride to our hotel to check in.
As I stood on the balcony of my hotel, looking out over Waikiki beach in the sultry night air, my phone beeped. It was a text from The Cure’s tour manager, Nick, with directions and where to get passes to see everyone afterward.
We showered and got a cab to the gig. The concert was sublime in a way all Cure gigs were, regardless of whether or not I was involved. The Hawaiians, who had never seen The Cure, really loved the show. Afterward Cindy and I made our way to the dressing room. Robert and I embraced and we had much to discuss, including Gary’s tragic passing. We had too much to say to each other.
He invited us back to his hotel on the seafront in Waikiki so that we could continue talking. We stayed up all night and eventually we made our way down to the beach to watch the sun come up. It was near dawn, and The Cure and many members of the crew and entourage were gathered on the beach. The predawn glow heralded the rising sun. Like a black blanket, the sea kept rolling forward, always forward, and gently crashed on the soft sand.
I have always loved Hawaii from the very first time I visited in the early 1990s. Something about the soft warm balmy air and the vibrant colors entranced me and never let me go. I get that beautiful feeling every time I go there and I was happy to be there with my oldest friend.
Robert and I stood on the soft sand slightly apart from the others. He had just come out of the water after a late-night dip. He had his arms around my shoulders and talked quietly into my ear.
“We are older men now, and now that we are older men . . . ” his voice trailed off.
I looked up into his face and in that way that old friends have I understood his meaning. Like another late night a million miles away in our youth at Milton Mount Gardens, we understood each other. It was a different day and all that had gone before was quietly fading from our memories. The raw emotions that had forced us apart were forgotten, all the hurt and the pain had evaporated, and all that was left was Robert and me in the predawn hour, two Imaginary Boys, standing on a beach.
I returned home to Los Angeles after that night on the beach in Hawaii. The sadness was gone, replaced with gratitude that things had worked out at last. I felt we had gone through so much in getting to this point that now was definitely the time to do something about it.
So I wrote to Robert and said as much. “I have no talents other than being in The Cure and writing. I can’t paint or do anything else creatively but I do have a story to tell.” I remembered that when we started we had decided that the means of expressing ourselves was not as important as the actual doing of it. I told him it would be the story of the Imaginary Boys and what happened, and my memories of the memories of why and where. I would try to make some sense of it all. I was starting on a journey into unknown territory without a map.
In the autumn of 2015 I returned to England to finish my research for this book. Now many years absent from her shores, I found that a different reality had shifted my perception of the place where I’d been born and raised. The place where the Imaginary Boys had started. As Cindy and I traveled around the country, meeting friends and family, I felt a slight unease with just being there. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but I felt really weird. As if everything I was experiencing was a little out of focus.
It was great to see old friends of course, people like Chris Mason, our old promotions man at Polydor, with whom I’d recently become reacquainted, and Dave Allen, the producer of several Cure records. People I hadn’t seen in nearly twenty-five years.
The streets of London looked the same, yet different. It was somewhere that I felt should be totally familiar to me but that now felt very alien. I wondered if maybe it was me that had changed, or whether the experiences I’d had after I had left had wrought some kind of shift in my perceptions.
Cindy and I caught the train down to Crawley. It was much as I recalled it from my youth. When we got there the autumn leaves were blowing around in the car park of the train station, a vortex of browns and yellows mingling with the dirt of the streets, the same streets that had inspired the Imaginary Boys to leave this godforsaken place for good.
I thought that after all this time I would have a better understanding of what exactly it was that drove us out and away from this town as young men. Why had we wanted to change our world with such fervor?
I went to see my brother Roger, who still lives in Crawley. We spent many hours talking about the family, about the town, about what it meant for him to live here now as an old man.
As I walked around the place it seemed like the stripping away of hope was still a daily occurrence here. Cindy and I passed a pub, one of the many I used to visit in my teens. The same type of people we used to encounter all those years ago, still there. They looked vacant, bored, and miserable, same as always. It’s a hard thing to describe but I know it when I see it. Apathy and hostility all rolled into one. Living in desperation on this cold little slab of rock on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. That’s my hometown in a nutshell.
The next day we flew out of Gatwick Airport back to Los Angeles. We had checked in and been through all the usual formalities. I was sitting with Cindy in the departure lounge waiting to board, lost in my thoughts about the past, the present, and what to make of it all.
Cindy looked up from her magazine reading, nudging me in the ribs. “Hey, isn’t that? . . . ” Then I heard a familiar voice.
“Hello, Lol!” I turned to look at the figure approaching me. It was Porl Thompson! I hadn’t seen him in nearly ten years. What was he doing here, I wondered.
He sat down, and after our mutual shock subsided, we started to chat about his plans. He explained that he was moving to California to live in the desert and paint. He had decided only the day before to make the journey and had just bought a ticket!
I was amazed. The fact that, unbeknownst to either of us, we had booked the same flight, at the same time, from the same airport, having not seen each other for a decade. Synchronicity or what?
We boarded the plane and, as we took off into the autumn sky, I had the strong realization that none of this—the book, the journey back from destruction—was about me or even Robert. It was about the thing that we had been given that had changed so many people’s lives and had once again changed me. The Cure. I understood that no matter what happened now, no matter where I went on this planet or what I might be doing, the dream of a band we had so long ago, the key to our escape out of our boring humdrum lives, was always going to be in me, a part of me. I understood at last that by recapturing that long-ago feeling, I could banish despair. I could forgive everybody everything, including myself. I could finally be cured.